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The Following User Says Thank You to Benedikt For This Useful Post:

it very hard for people just starting out to find more than just occasional work. If you are in high school and have just started drawing and painting, figure about ten years to get to the level of ability that will get you paying work.

I personally don't have much experience with the industry but the people I have interacted from multiple artist hangouts are all over the place on the success scale. Depends on your skill level, enthusiasm, location, available company ... etc, god know where you will end up. Do a lot of searching, preferably prioritizing local studio first.

There are too many variables to ever give a concrete answer I think. Like if you live the the Eastern parts of the world you can get a lot of 3D works for production because of outsourcing, while fantasy concept arts are not so much. If there are some small-medium mobile game kind of studios in your area, then it could be easier to break into.

You’re kind of asking “how heavy is a bag of bricks?”. It depends. There’s so many variables no one can really give you a solid answer. Working freelance vs for a consulting company vs an in house studio, what stage of the design you’re working on, how far along the project is, what the deadlines are....

Check out FZD school channel on youtube, some podcast in there have info on concept art work/education. Also other youtube channels on the subject are ArtCafe, Schoolism, Chris Oatley, Marco Bucci, Cubebrush, Sinix. I dont think you have a really clear idea of what concept art is, do some research.

Your portfolio should have at least 5 to10 pieces in it and you should update it every 6 months with all new images. If you can't do that then you aren't ready for professional work. A portfolio doesn't just show your quality, it shows your ability to produce work consistently over long periods of time. When I was an art director anybody who submitted the same portfolio of images twice to our company went into the trash bin, it showed they weren't serious about making art.

Your portfolio should have at least 5 to10 pieces in it and you should update it every 6 months with all new images. If you can't do that then you aren't ready for professional work. A portfolio doesn't just show your quality, it shows your ability to produce work consistently over long periods of time. When I was an art director anybody who submitted the same portfolio of images twice to our company went into the trash bin, it showed they weren't serious about making art.

Isn't that tough if you've been working on NDA stuff and can't show new work?

Just to be clear, currently, I do over 100 finished paintings a year for my traditional galleries and science fiction and fantasy venues. That doesn't count sketches and failed attempts. When I was doing production art as a full-time job I still managed 60 paintings a year of personal work on top of my production art. As a professional artist, a finished piece of art every two weeks, every year of your career is not an unreasonable expectation. As an artist, you are supposed to finish pieces of art, treat it as a job and it will become your job, treat it like a hobby and you are guaranteed to make it a hobby.

You need to be able to create a fully realized scene or scenes from a short written brief and other supporting documents. The image you create should take into account the restrictions of the medium it is being created for so that it can actually be used in production as a guide for further development. That means being able to render environments including set pieces like buildings and people and tech into a believable setting that tells a story. You have to know how to draw paint and compose an image to a high degree of competence and be able to finish it in a timely manner.